New Reality: Undergraduate Teaching, Grant Writing, & Relationship Building
The Fall 2025 semester is in full swing at UC Berkeley, and I am reflecting on completing my first in-person class, submitting an internal grant application, and building relationships with students, faculty, and staff across campus. It is truly such a privilege to be able to lead a class of curious young people who are interested in learning and unlearning “banking models of education” they experienced throughout their K–12 years. In the first class meeting alone, I could sense the concern in them over the state of education in the U.S. and its deep enmeshment within a stratified, unequal society. It is terrifying to think that there are states in which the word “critical” and its related analysis of power, hegemony, and whiteness as property are banned and erroneously labeled as “anti-American.” But as a critical race resistance scholar in education, I am not surprised. I am also not surprised that recent discourses about SFFA’s attack on Kamehameha Schools’ admissions policy do not explicitly connect it to assaults on free speech, academic freedom, rights to protest, LGBTQ+ peoples, non-white peoples, women, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at higher education institutions and beyond. This reality is old knowledge. History on the brink of repeating itself. While I am glad to be working at a professional school that remains publicly committed to defending individual and group rights among students and academic workers, I remain anxious for what is to come, both in California, Hawai’i, and other left-leaning states.
On a lighter note, I am celebrating a win for the professional journey. I submitted my first grant in collaboration with close colleagues for a passion project that we hope will turn into a research thread on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander K–12 teachers. I’m also celebrating a week of interviews with potential undergraduate research assistants for AANHPI projects, which have been an uplifting and motivating experience as a first-year faculty member.
Lastly, I’m celebrating moments of joy, laughter, and knowledge exchange with students, colleagues, and friends. While I am still orienting myself to what it means to be an acting assistant professor and my institution’s only Native Hawaiian woman faculty member, I feel supported and cared for by fellow assistant professors and Native Hawaiian community members that I have had the honor of meeting in the past two weeks. I have also felt extremely sustained by taking a trip home during the Labor Day week to see loved ones and participate in aloha ʻāina days with Indigenous leaders and allies. This new reality of undergraduate teaching, grant writing, manuscript editing, and relationship building is quite overwhelming, but it also feels good to go to bed exhausted and to wake up energized and ready to give 110% to my students, my friendships, and my commitments to ʻāina and kānaka. As I was reminded today, this is the path that I chose for myself. This is how I self-determined my present. The “work” of publishing and serving in higher education has only just begun, but the “Work” of teaching young people to transgress in the way of bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Daniel Solórzano, and James Baldwin and contributing to the Ea of the Lāhui Hawaiʻi never ended. It continues and will continue until the very last aloha ʻāina. Mahalo.
